


Umbrellas on Streetcorners

by gladdecease



Category: How I Met Your Mother
Genre: Community: comment_fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-26
Updated: 2009-04-26
Packaged: 2017-10-17 02:26:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gladdecease/pseuds/gladdecease
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, How Ted Meets The Woman Who Would Be His Wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Umbrellas on Streetcorners

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://community.livejournal.com/comment_fic/24015.html?thread=3865295#t3865295), in response to [summerstorm](http://summerstorm.livejournal.com/profile)'s prompt: How I Met Your Mother, Ted/author's choice, lucky clover

The first time they meet is entirely by accident. She smiles politely in his direction while walking in opposite directions, and he doesn't notice. He is by this point in all-but-hometown a New Yorker, and New Yorkers never notice strangers in the street. Especially not when it's raining.

She pauses on a street corner and huddles under her umbrella as a strong gust blows by, and wishes for summer. She hears a man swear and turns around to see the same guy scrambling for an umbrella that's gotten out of his hands. It flips around in mid-air, headed her way. Without thinking, she reaches out and grabs it.

He's out of breath when he reaches her, thanks her for saving the umbrella. When he asks for it back, she smiles at him and gives him her umbrella, then runs across the street just as the walk lights turn red.

He calls the number she scribbled on the tag of her umbrella the next day, and the first thing he asks is why she'd taken his.

Looking at the yellow umbrella, she smiles and says that it had been hers first.

After their second month of dating, she walks ~~upstairs~~ back with him to his apartment, where he introduces her to 'the folks'. Even though she's only known him this long, she already knows that meeting his friends' approval is way more important than meeting his parents'.

She both loves and hates Marshall and Lily from the start; those kinds of real life college sweethearts are the sort of people that almost make her believe in all the true love fairytale happy endings she writes. Robin and Barney are no better. The epic story of a man whore who falls in love just _begs_ to be written.

Really, she could write her next novel based entirely on any of their experiences, and the public would eat it up.

But she'd promised herself not to use her friends in her work, and if this thing with Ted is going to last, his friends are going to be hers. So, instead, she starts to write a piece about a girl who loses a yellow umbrella and the boy who finds it. She shows Ted the start, and he asks her not to spoil the ending for him.

She never finishes it.

On their third anniversary, Ted asks her how she'd known he had the umbrella she'd lost. With a smile, she shows him the four leaf clover sticker someone at that party had stuck to the underside of the umbrella. When it had gone flying, she'd seen it and knew.

He smiles, huffs a little surprised sound. "I guess," he says with a good deal of bravado, "that makes it my good-luck charm. It led me to you."

She punches him in the shoulder for being so corny, but kisses the bruise later, grinning.


End file.
